Neil Blackadder

The play’s subtitle is “Scenes from the life of assisted dying advocate Gustav Strom.” Alice, from Germany, and John, from England, travel to Switzerland in order legally to commit suicide, with the help of Doctor Strom, and Eve, a young woman eager to assist him. One enthusiastic review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung called the play “a clinically objective social drama that manages in two dozen short scenes to discuss the ethical, emotional, political and religious aspects of assisted suicide while leaving the verdict up to the spectator.”

A group of old friends reunites for a barbecue, on a plot of land where Hannes and Heidi are planning to build a house—right where they all grew up together. Nostalgic feelings arise, but so do old rivalries. And instead of finishing with dessert, the barbecue ends with a cake-fight. In later scenes, Hannes keeps trying to build the house even after Heidi leaves him, and everyone’s belief in the constancy of home has been called into question. When Alpenvorland won the prestigious Autorenpreis at the Heidelberger Stückemarkt, the jury wrote: “Thomas Arzt has written a fierce comedy of manners, a large-scale panorama reminiscent of Arthur Schnitzler. He interrupts the realistic dialogue with prose passages and songs in which ideas flow and visions flare. The characters are drawn with psychological precision, forming the portrait of a generation of lone wolves struggling to orient themselves and to find warmth and security. But those who never left haven’t found happiness either and mourn the chances they never seized.” The translation was developed at hotINK at the Lark in New York in May-June 2014.

The parents have both succeeded professionally through working with images: the father travels the world photographing war zones, the mother edits a journal devoted to contemporary art. But their son and daughter react with cold detachment to such humanism. Instead, they devote themselves to each other and to animal rights activism, eventually becoming bigger media stars than their parents. In a series of fast-paced scenes and with sharp satire, American Shot depicts an unlikely yet emblematic North American family. The original in French (Quebec) premiered in Montreal in 2008.

Franz wants his son Jan to join him in and eventually take over the lucrative advertising agency he inherited from his own father. But Jan is committed to nothing other than spending the wealth he’ll inherit, and seducing any women who cross his path. Back in the ‘60s, Franz was a hippie, and is thus in part responsible for Jan’s rejection of convention; but unlike his father at the same age, Jan is not ready to become part of the system. Kricheldorf’s play is smart, funny, and insightful; as a reviewer in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung put it, she “interweaves the myth of Don Giovanni with a kind of screwball comedy about conflicts of generations and classes among dropouts and climbers.”
Full script published in The Mercurian 1.3 (2008).

A family drama revolving around the reunion of two men who were good friends at university, but who since then have taken very different paths reflective of the political climate in the 21st century. Based on the ground-breaking 1889 Naturalist drama by Gerhart Hauptmann.

Fascinated by car accidents, four people collide into one another at a gas station: Rolf, an insurance agent, searching for the reason behind the suspicious, increasing number of crashes; Beate, the owner of the station; Jane, a former movie star whose beauty has been ruined in an accident; and a truck driver who warns us of the dangerous road ahead.

The ‘Grillenparz’ of the title is a hill on the outskirts of a rural Austrian town, where once every summer the employees of a local company put on a special party—a chance to get back to nature and let their hair down. But this year is different, because the guests include potential investors from overseas, as the company strives to enter the global marketplace. And then there’s the troubling presence on the hill of a mysterious hunter, who may not only be taking aim at the rabbits and deer. No one wants to talk about whatever happened a year ago, and it all gets blurred in this year’s wild partying. But gradually, Flora—who hasn’t spoken a word since last year’s event—recovers her own repressed story. Throughout, a chorus of crickets—the ‘Grillen’ who nest in the hill and give it its name—comment in singing on eternal values, on violence and on forgiveness.

A dog narrates the odd behavior between a man and woman who chain themselves to one another whilst barely being able to stand each other. At the very moment that they meet, the dog runs up and stays with them because he – like them - has nothing to lose and he – like them - is looking for protection.

Jona’s sister gave her the present of a 10-day Caribbean cruise, but thanks to a worldwide pandemic, she has been confined to her windowless cabin and has been for a while. Is it two weeks now? Three? Any sense of time dissolves in these exotic waters. Jona has become an inmate in a luxury jail where everyone must get used to their new, monstrous normality. But the food is slowly running out. And Jona doesn’t know if, should she ever make it back home, she’ll still have a job…

Dani and Mani, brother and sister, come home for their grandma’s birthday. But they also attend a friend’s funeral, where they run into Bine and Oli, who are now married. Oli used to be interested in Dani, way back when they were all friends. And somehow it now seems there’s nothing left for Dani and Mani. No one counts on them. Their mother dreams of matricide. Their father dreams of starting over. Something is bound to happen. Acclaimed Austrian playwright Ewald Palmetshofer weaves language and dark wit into a searing tragicomedy.

Elsie has just lost her mother, and Matt, is searching for his past. They're brought together by the hole that opened up in the asphalt and the contents of the car that fell to the bottom.
For more information, see entry in Mishka Lavigne's profile.

Illegal Helpers is a dramatic work portraying the conflict between state law and the humanitarian acts of assistance to immigrants which may overstep legal boundaries. It is based on interviews conducted by the playwright, Maxi Obexer, over a period of several years. She spoke with people in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland who had assisted refugees, and researched their individual stories.

In the Dead Mountains takes place in a psychiatric facility. In contrast to other plays dealing with the subject, in Arzt’s play the patients do not embody some kind of anarchic alternative to mainstream society, but rather are just as “sick” as the world from which they have fled into this closed environment. The melancholy head doctor has long since recognized that the therapy she can offer individuals is not more than patchwork in the face of the deficiencies of society. The new arrival Raimund appears to have turned to stone, Nepomuk is suffering from brain damage following drug abuse, and Emanuel, who has been unemployed for years, gave up on himself a long time ago. Only the nurse Anton remains optimistic and is preparing a puppet show for New Year’s, while Nepomuk remains convinced about the world’s imminent apocalyptic ending.

Two women, Babsi and Jeani, and one man, Max, all now in their early- to mid-30s, meet up again having not seen each other for several years. They used to be close, and they’re pleased to have a chance to get together—but they no longer have much in common. In the course of one night, they take stock of who they are now versus who they were then. One critic described Palmetshofer’s text as “fragmented, truncated colloquial language that is at once hyperrealistic stammering and rhythmic poetry”; another reviewer characterized the play as “a bewitchingly beautiful elegy on impotence, on the impossibility of endowing life with truly outstanding high points.”

A three-character play involving two parents in the midst of a divorce and the young man they hire to look after their daughter when both leave town for a weekend. As a critic for Swiss radio put it, “In his latest play, Lukas Bärfuss takes on the lack of morals in a world without God. How are we living? How do we wish to live? He doesn’t provide any answers.” This script has great potential to appeal to theatres given its small cast of skilfully drawn characters—“Three characters condemned to failure, yet all somehow sympathetic and totally believable” (Deutschlandradio Kultur)—and its thematic content: “It is obvious that the themes addressed here, like guilt, refusal to take responsibility, voluntary abdication, or fate, are extremely topical in other realms too, such as business” (Tages-Anzeiger).

A stranger shows up in the main square of a village. He’s expecting to buy the land on behalf of his company, which plans to turn it into a profitable rice field. As he waits for the seller who was supposed to meet him there, he talks with a woman whom he takes to be the caretaker of this land where the vegetation is inexplicably dying. She’s a rebellious woman who speaks in enigmatic language, and makes clear that she feels herself viscerally connected to the earth — a perspective incompatible with the stranger’s project.

In a poverty-stricken country whose natural resources have been plundered by companies from the developed world, geologist Henry and his engineer Edward search for untapped oil reserves while Henry’s wife Eve cowers in a basement in the city, mistreating her indigenous servant Gomua. When the two men return having finally discovered more oil, previously concealed truths—about the three of them but also about the interaction of western and non-western societies—come explosively to the surface. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung concluded in its positive review of the premiere in Berlin: “this deep-hole drilling has a high yield.”

Tara has applied for asylum and is being questioned. She knows German and is able to speak on her own behalf. The situation is at once bureaucratic and existential, and the stakes are high: she has to reason and narrate her way into a future in Germany. In the presence of an interviewer who’s accustomed to being critical and an interpreter and compatriot who’s both sensitive and strangely arbitrary, Tara is compelled to go back into her past. Back into the Middle Eastern country she had to flee because through her work she got caught between political sides. Back into a situation in which she wasn’t interviewed, but tortured.

Commissioned and premiered in Kassel, the German city most closely associated with the Brothers Grimm, Rosa and Blanca presents a contemporary take on the tale of Snow-White and Rose-Red. In Kricheldorf’s play, it becomes a story about friendship between women and about young women’s loss of innocence. Her version is theatrically very inventive, including a bear who plays basketball, a foul-mouthed, heavy-drinking yet endearing dwarf, and hallucinogenic cherries. Half the ten roles are animals. Rosa and Blanca manages to be both light and dark: as with traditional fairytales, beneath the ostensibly charming story (two girls living in the woods with the animals) there lies a good deal of rich psychological insight.

Dora has been taking tranquilizers for years because otherwise her behavior was uncontrollably wild. The drugs have kept her in a semi-comatose state, and now Dora’s mother wants to know what her daughter is really like and convinces their doctor to take Dora off the drugs. Dora develops an enormous hunger for life, demonstrates her own will, and, above all, discovers her sexuality—to a degree which far exceeds adult ideas about how she should live.

Tiger, a young man who has become a successful and wealthy conceptual artist, visits his old friends Lea and Fred—struggling actress and writer respectively—and by the time he leaves, Lea has agreed that should Tiger die, his tattoo-covered body will be plasticized and transferred to Lea’s possession. Before long, Tiger’s assistant Alex delivers a glass case containing Tiger’s half-naked corpse. The discomfort felt by Lea, Fred, and Naomi—Lea’s half-sister, a gallery-owner and sometime girlfriend of Tiger—gives way to awareness of the potential value of this piece. Then the situation is further complicated when Tiger shows up alive and reveals that his friends have been the victims of a hoax, video footage of which will become his newest work. The play ends with an unexpected outbreak of violence followed by an enigmatic suggestion of yet one more layer of fiction. Tattoo is a sharp-edged, multi-layered satire of the contemporary art world.

Bärfuss’ plays often deal with topical situations; in this case, it’s that of a man who discovers through genetic testing that he is not the father of the little boy to whom he’s been a devoted parent. The Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote: “The question of what biological paternity means in the era of genetic testing is illuminated and examined with Swiss precision. Not, however, in a crude or didactic fashion—Bärfuss is too practiced a dramatic craftsman for that, with an undeniable feeling for language—but dexterously packaged in thoroughly stirring confrontations among the characters.” The Test has proven one of Bärfuss’ most successful plays, the premiere production in Munich having been followed by stagings at major theatres in Berlin, Vienna, Hannover and elsewhere.

Pee-wee’s Playhouse meets Rambo in this hilarious, pitch-dark parable about toxic masculinities and the limits of liberal do-goodery in extreme times. This outrageous comedy has seen productions in Germany, Argentina, Guatemala, Mexico, Colombia and Venezuela, and the English translation premiered at Cherry Arts in Ithaca, NY in 2019.

Solingen, Germany, 1993. A racist attack, one of dozens of “isolated cases.” A house catches fire; five people die. In Turks, Fire, mothers - survivors, murder victims and the mother of a perpetrator - try to find a (common) language for the events of this night.

Three women, three generations, an unresolved past that stinks of betrayal and blind obedience: the unmarried woman connects April 1945 with the present. The woman is old and has an alienated daughter and a grand-daughter whom she feels closer to, even though the young woman is digging through her past. A female chorus of four completes the ensemble through which Palmetshofer uncovers who might have done what, and why. First produced at Vienna’s Burgtheater in 2014, Palmetshofer’s play won the Mühlheim Drama Prize in 2015, and the premiere staging was invited to the Theaterteffen in Berlin. As one of the Vienna critics put it, “In his female drama, Palmetshofer combines rhythmic stylized language with empty everyday words to create a suffocating tragedy for our times that is riveting from beginning to end.”

Rebekka Kricheldorf's Villa Dolorosa has the subtitle "Three Botched Birthdays (freely adapted from Chekhov's Three Sisters)." Where Chekhov, in a tragicomic mode, depicted the plight of three sisters at the turn of the twentieth century who had understandably limited capacity to give their own lives meaning, Kricheldorf writes a comedy about three early-twenty-first-century sisters who could make different choices but fail to. One critic described Villa Dolorosa as “A play about people’s inability to put their supposed freedom to any good use whatsoever.” Through her witty and entertaining depiction of characters who can’t even throw a good birthday party, Kricheldorf explores contemporary attitudes to leisure and labor. Here as in her other plays, Kricheldorf combines a light comic touch with insightful treatment of important issues. The city of Kassel awarded her a Comic Literature prize for Villa Dolorosa, but as another critic wrote, this comedy “is interesting in part precisely because it is not a satire, but rather animated by a humor that does not poke fun and which is always blended with melancholy.” In 2013 a French translation was produced at Espace GO in Montreal – and named by Le Journal de Montréal one of the five best productions of the year.